Tripwire Reviews The City Of Lost Children 4K Restoration On Blu-Ray Now

Innocence Lost

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows casts his eye over StudioCanal’s restored Ultra 4K edition of Jeunet and Caro’s The City Of Lost Children out from today on Ultra 4K Blu Ray…

The City of Lost Children
Directors: Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Stars: Ron Perlman, Daniel Emilfolk, Judith Vittet, Dominique Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus

Delicatessen was a brilliant debut, an imaginative and thought-provoking cinema debut for French filmmakers Caro and Jeunet. Its follow-up The City of Lost Children, released in 1995, is an impressive second movie. Available for the first time on Blu-ray, it displays the sort of bold and dynamic sense of style and ideas that made Delicatessen such a memorable slice of post-apocalyptic fantasy. Daniel Emilfork plays demented scientist Krank, who kidnaps orphans to steal their dreams in the hope that he can hinder the ageing process and have reveries of his own. Krank is assisted in his endeavours by a group of cretinous clones, all played by Dominique Pinon (the protagonist in Delicatessen). Ron Perlman is circus strongman One who feels a sense of fillial responsibility for young girl Mitte (Judith Vittet), even though they are not actually blood relatives.

The City of Lost Children looks wonderful and even though it doesn’t hold together quite as well as predecessor Delicatessen, Caro and Jeunet have created a wonderfully rich and vibrant milieu to tell their tall tale in. The pair have been heavily influenced by Terry Gilliam and The City of Lost Children reflects this perhaps even more than Delicatessen did. You can also see the major influence of bande dessinée and artists like Moebius and Enki Bilal on display here too. It feels like a very French film as did its progenitor. The colour palette throughout is very deliberate, using rich yet faded colours. It isn’t quite as perfect a film as its predecessor as its story does collapse a little towards the end but its ambition and visual flair and panache means that you can forgive it its flaws.

Perlman looks fantastic but his French sounds a little stilted and artificial. Vittet is magnetic on screen as One’s young charge, with her worldliness and nouse but also a kind of vulnerability, and Pinon, returning from Delicatessen, is wonderfully unhinged in his multiple roles as the clones and the mythic scientist that they are based on. Genevieve Brunet and Odile Mallet as criminal mastermind The Octopus, who live by getting the children of the city to steal for them, are genuinely unsettling and demented. It is a real shame that the pair went their separate ways a few years ago as their two first films showed a wonderfully skewed promise of what could have been. If people enjoyed Delicatessen, they should check this out, now looking the way it should have always done on 4K Blu ray. 

The restored version looks magnificent with its greens and browns lent a lot of extra richness on the screen thanks to the new treatment. The extras are of varying quality with a couple of legacy ones taken from previous releases but the new interview with Jeunet and Caro is genuinely interesting and offers a huge amount of insight into the filmmaking process here. They point out that this film was created before the extensive use of CGI so every visual effect on screen here is a physical one, which does lend it a very unique feel. 

For fans of idiosyncratic fantasy films and something which is very different to the usual fare, The City of Lost Children 4K is a must-buy and its impact has not been diminished since its first release back in 1995.